How secure is your password?

With the security breaches in the press of late such as iCloud, Talk-Talk there has been a lot of talk about weak passwords and lazy users.

A password is a word or string of characters used for authentication to prove an identity or grant access to a resources. This could be access to your business network, your email or your bank account. So when your asked for a particular number of characters for a password it’s just security overload right? No one would guess your password.

Wrong!

Below is a list of the most common passwords of 2014 which hackers can crack instantly

123456

password

12345

12345678

qwerty

123456789

1234

basball

dragon

football

However, if you took ‘password’ and changed it to ‘password001’ it would take a hacker a year.

But these days you need passwords for almost everything so how do you remember them all but at the same time make them secure?

The easiest way is to use a phrase such as ‘ilovemycar’. This would take about a year to crack. But if you change it to ‘IL0V3mYc@r’ that would take 58 years!

Using a phrase is the easiest way to secure yourself and to remember your password. The stronger you make your passwords the safer you and your data will be.